Terms and ideas
A glossary of terms and ideas from the Landscape Urbanism lexicon:
Acupuncture: Urban infiltration with small towers offers multiple solutions for historic cities due to their benefit of minimal footprint with maximum capacity for transformation – including abattoirs and cemeteries.
Adaptive Design: An integrated, whole-system, learning-based approach to the management of human-ecological interactions, with explicit implications for planning interventions and design forms, which must be both adaptive and resilient. Ecology has gone from subservient science to design partner in shaping global cities.
Analog Ecologies: Projects that attempt to model, analogously, the responsive behaviors of living systems in nonliving constructions or processes.
Anthropocene: A geological epoch, or formal unit of geological time, in which human activities have had a significant impact on the planet’s natural ecosystems; a process by which the earth is being remade by urban industrial systems. Coined by Marvin Hodson.
Collisive Sites: Territory that facilitates high activity or high collision. Surface accumulation of infrastructure creates high-performance territory. Coined by Clare Lyster.
Constructed Ground: Constructed ground is a term that bears similarity to Unwin's 'Traces on the ground.' It goes beyond a base map or a 'datascape' and embraces all of the traces of humans on the ground, present and past and future; and all forms of infrastructure: agriculture, deforestation, pipes, roads, grading, paving, buildings, etc.. Lisa Pollak elaborates on the concept: “For a long time, in research and practice, I have been focusing on what I call constructed ground. This focus enables inclusion of living systems in my research and design work without segregating them into an exclusive domain of “nature.” The idea of constructed ground registers the fact that the ground of any site is not background; it isn’t flat; it isn’t a tabula rasa — it is always already constructed.”
Curated Ecologies: A set of dynamics that we structure and react with over a period of time.
Datascape: A visual representation of all the measurable forces that may influence, steer or regulate the work of the architect.
Deep Ecology: A perspective that sees the human being within and as part of the larger ecosphere, and not simply as an independent entity that inhabits it.
Dynamic Ecology: Ecology characterized by constant change and resilience, which requires designers to embrace multiple scales and begin to lead multi-disciplinary teams.
Ecological Infrastructure: The structural landscape network composed of critical landscape elements and spatial patterns. Coined by Kong Yu.
Ecological Security: Safeguarding flows of resources, infrastructure, and services at the national scale. Coined by Marvin Hodson.
Ecological Urbanism: Urban recycling of the remnants of the industrial city. As defined by Mohsen Mostafavi.
Ecology: The study of the interaction between organisms and the environment.
Ecotechtonics: Specific spatial and temporal projects in which ecology and economy merge around technoscientific design. Coined by Marvin Hodson.
Emerald Necklace: Large natural and semi-natural patches (emeralds) connected by green corridors (necklaces). The connections are for the movement of people, wildlife and water.
Emergence: The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.
Emergent Landscape: The urban form emerges from the interaction of complex systems (ecological, political, social, economic, etc) that make up cities and human settlement; urban form is the product of a complex confluence of a potentially endless set of factors.
EnLUDe: Environmentally Led Urban Design.
Genius Loci: A place is always a whole consisting of concrete things with material substance, form, surface, and color: this is the precondition for finding a foothold for design in a given space.
Hybrid Ecologies: Responsive design systems that draw upon environmental, engineering, and social considerations simultaneously.
Invisible Infrastructure: Invisible infrastructure generally refers to non-tangible infrastructure such as wireless communications. More broadly, the term can refer to all forms infrastructure, such as power transmission lines, that often go unnoticed. A general tendency in development has been to make infrastructure more invisible and remote, even as it becomes more individualized and less communal. Landscape urbanism argues that this invisible infrastructure escapes the attention of the masses and that there is a need to make it visible for the masses to appreciate it.
Koolhaas’ SCAPE: A condition in which architecture, infrastructure, and landscape are undifferentiated and subject to the same forces. Coined by Rem Koolhaas.
Landschaft: A German term for a unit of human occupation.
Landskip: A German term for a scenic view.
Liminal Space: Space that exists on the threshold between two different planes, rural and urban. The articulation of liminal space is one feature that sets landscape urbanism apart from New Urbanism or the City Beautiful movement.
LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability): Eco-buyers constitute the world’s fastest growing consumer group – this group tends to pamper itself rather than trying to improve the world; it’s approach to ethics derives more from aesthetics.
LOVOS (Lifestyles of Voluntary Simplicity): Believe it is better to reduce consumption, renounce all that is unnecessary, and live life in a new way.
Metalogistical Spaces: Cities are metalogistical spaces constituted of dense concretions of infrastructural logistics. Coined by Marvin Hodson.
Natural System: Systems that humans have not made or strongly altered. Four categories: “pure” nature, semi-natural, intensive-use greenspace, and built areas.
Patch Dynamics: Patch dynamics proposes that all landscapes are dynamic and come in three states: potential, active, and degraded. Patches in the potential state are transformed into active patches through colonization of the patch by dispersing species arriving from other active or degrading patches. Patches are transformed from the active state to the degraded state when the patch is abandoned, and patches change from degraded to potential through a process of recovery.
Petrolic-cityscape: Urban landscapes dominated by auto and oil-dependence.
Political Ecology: Combines the concerns of ecology and political economy. I.E. There are a series of urban and environmental processes that negatively affect some social groups while benefiting others.
Pre-landscape: Forming a tapestry that will become urbanized over time; a Central Park of future development.
Radical Horizontal Urbanism: A vast mat-like field where scattered pockets of density are knitted together by high-speed, high-volume roads. Coined by Pierre Belanger.
Resilience: Planning for failure. Resilient systems are those that resist damage and recover quickly from stochastic disturbances.
Smart Dust: Tiny locatable chips that are installed on products to trace them; creates a new infrastructure of networked digital elements.
Spaces of Disagreement: The linguistic cul-de-sac of contemporary urbanism is constructed around the false choice between critical cultural relevance and environmental survival, creating spaces of disagreement that require interdisciplinary cooperation. Under this view, the city is a continuous system of relational forces and flows, as opposed to a collection of objects. Coined by Charles Waldheim.
Stim and Dross: Dross is vast wastelands created by the deindustrialization of older city areas and the rapid urbanization of newer city areas – both processes catalyzed by the drastic decrease in transportation costs, creating a centrifugal force. In its original context, the term refers to waste products or impurities formed on the surface of molten metal during smelting; something worthless as opposed to valuable. Conversely, Stim refers to urban places of high ‘intensity,’ as in stimulation. Coined by Lars Lerup.
Structured Ecologies: The strategy of working with or alongside the substance and processes of dynamic ecologies: plants, waters, wildlife, etc.
Sub-urbanism: A discipline composed of projects first inspired by suburban scenarios and in which the traditional hierarchy imposed by urbanism between program and site is reversed, the site becoming the material and horizon of the project. Coined by Sébastien Marot.
Synecologies: Synthetic, integrated cultural-natural ecologies that emerge from forgotten landscapes. Coined by Nina-Marie Lister.
Two-speed Landscape: A temporary landscape that is succeeded/displaced by urbanism.
Urban Ecology: The study of the interaction between organisms, built structures, and the natural environment, where people are aggregated around city or town.
Void Framework: The voids of figure-ground diagrams are protected from “contamination by the city.” Open spaces, or voids, in a cityscape are desirable.
Weak Geography: The exploitation of weak cycles in the real estate market.
